"It was everything I had
expected,'' Olsen, a U.S. scientist and businessman,
told The Associated Press two days after returning to Earth from the international space
station aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. Olsen is the third private citizen to
make a paid trip into space.
"It was kind of like this
wondrous thing. I mean, we have seen thousands of pictures of the Earth and so
forth, but just to see it with your own eyes and then say 'It really is round, and
how finite it is ...''' he said. "You see this little crust of atmosphere
against the dark sky and you realize we don't have that much to breathe.''
Olsen also found the
zero-gravity conditions to be a treat.
"I enjoyed the feeling
weightlessness, just floating around and seeing the outside world,'' he said.
But the enjoyment may have distracted him from keeping track of his personal
belongings - he admitted that a small digital camera floated out of his
jumpsuit pocket and went missing.
That may sound like typical
tourist carelessness, but Olsen dislikes the "space tourist'' tag often hung on
him and the other two citizen space visitors - American Dennis Tito and South
African Mark Shuttleworth.
"I dedicated two years of
my life to this,'' he said. "It's not just a hop-on-and-go kind of thing.''
During his training, a medical
problem cropped up that forced his trip to be postponed, but to his relief
he later
got the go-ahead. "The biggest thing I was nervous about was not being able to
go. You know, it's a fear we all have: 'Here's the test, I'd better not fail
it.'''
He also said the station
was more crowded than he'd expected, but that the food was more than
satisfactory. "It's not gourmet food, it can't be ... but the shrimp cocktail -
I've had worse in restaurants on the ground,'' he said.
Olsen returned with Russian
Sergei
Krikalev and American John Phillips, who had been aboard the station six
months. They were replaced on the ISS by William
McArthur and Valery Tokarev, who were with Olsen when he blasted
off for the station on Oct. 1.
After being pulled out of
the capsule when it landed in Kazakhstan, Phillips had appeared to be slipping
in and out of consciousness. At a news conference at Star City, the Russian space-training
facility north of Moscow, Phillips said the landing was not as comfortable as
on U.S. space shuttles; he went to the ISS in 2001 aboard the shuttle
Endeavour.
"I'm not sure if I lost
consciousness or not, but my head was spinning ... I felt strong, but my head
was spinning,'' he said, adding that he hopes the United States will be able to
restore regular shuttle flights next year. The program was grounded in 2003
after the Columbia disaster; the shuttle Discovery went up in July, but the
program was put on hold again after foam insulation peeled away from the
shuttle.
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